I wanted to use it with my home network which I'm required to have WPA on because I use it for work. I read that network manager would not do the job, so I switched to wicd, using first the version in Jaunty's repositories and then the version from the wicd team's repository. I also read that you needed updated firmware to make this wifi card work with WPA, so I downloaded the "agere_sta_fw.bin" firmware, made sure it was the correct length (not corrupted by gitweb), and put it in /lib/firmware, and dmesg told me that it had in fact loaded Lucent/Agere version 9.28 and "WPA-PSK" was suported.

I confirmed that I could connect to my home network with encryption turned off, then turned it back on again, and connected, with wicd.

And it worked! It worked great.

And the next day it stopped working. And I don't think I changed anything.

Specifically what stopped working was DHCP. wicd hung on "obtaining an IP address."

Hoping to get more information I tried to suss out a way of connecting via the command line, and learned about wpa-suppliant and such. I concocted a wpa-suppliant.conf that gave me some very encouraging looking output, talking about connecting successfully.... (now I've lost the successful wpa-suppliant.conf and can't figure out what I had. Dang.) Anyway, even then I would run dhclient and fail to get an IP address.

Any clues on where to start here?

I'll post all the extra debug info y'all like on request, I just thought maybe I could focus the discussion a little by describing the situation so maybe there would be specific debug info that would be useful rather than spamming you with every possible piece of info at the beginning.

NiteFalll

October 7th, 2009, 04:34 PM

I wish I could give you a good answer for this issue.
I have a satellite 1955-S803 with a built-in orinoco card
and it's giving me problems as well.

So first yes, my transmit button is turned on.
I checked to make sure the driver is loaded:

so I manually had to set the IP before it would scan but hey scanning is good and those are 2 cells in my area. I'm supposed to be using the GreyMusic one. Thats me so lets ping it first: I know that I know the IP of that GreyMusic is 192.168.2.1